If you’re the owner of an NVIDIA graphics card and an early adopter, electing to upgrade your video driver to WHQL-certified version 196.75, you’ll want to quickly downgrade to the stable version 196.21 before doing permanent damage to your video card.
The newest drivers are no longer available through the Nvidia website due to multiple reports about video card failures. It’s believed that the latest driver version has erroneously affected the control settings resulting in fan failures that can be attributed to the fans either not spinning at all or spinning at the incorrect speed. Without proper cooling, the GPU (graphics processing unit) is susceptible to overheating and permanent damage. Another symptom consumers are reporting is the unexpected shutdown or freezing of their personal computers.
What’s really interesting is that video gamers playing any one of the games Warcraft 3, World of Warcraft or StarCraft 2 Beta seem to be even more prone to this risk. Blizzard Entertainment has also acknowledged the problem, recommending users to uninstall this driver version and revert back to the earlier driver.
So far, the video cards that seem affected are the 8800GT, 8800GTS, 9800GT, 9800GTX, 9800GTX+ and the GTS 250.
